signpost marking the next step to hell.
For I knew in that moment that Schussler was seeking “consultation.” Each call had been made after a difficult session with the patient; each was more insistent than the last. The doctor was in trouble. She could not handle the patient who lay before her, heart open on the table. She could not guide my dear patient’s journey, and she knew it. Consultation. But it doesn’t matter what those therapists, analysts, counselors, doctors, psychiatrists call it; they need some other doctor to save them from the mess they have created for themselves. What they are seeking is help.
I knew about such things. One of my own dear practitioners revealed to me that she had been seeking consultation on my case, explaining she had overidentified with me, her personal “issues” clouding “our work.” Her father also had committed suicide, she felt compelled to tell me. Thank you very much—bitch (I thought; I was twenty-five and still said such things). Why tell me? Why not just bear your own travails silently? I quit that therapist, but not before asking if she should not pay me for the insights I had given her.
Now I realized that Dr. Schussler could indeed be as incompetent as my former therapist—and what fear for my dear patient descended upon me! The patient’s passage (and mine) was made more perilous than ever, since we could not rely upon the person who made the desperate calls to Gurevitch. Once more I asked myself: Who was this Dr. Dora Schussler, this clinician who had presumed to force the issue of adoption and then found herself so unprepared for its aftermath?
Everything I thought I knew about Dr. Schussler suddenly vanished. The particular place in my mind in which I had carried her image all these months—empty. Most likely she was not sixty, not mature, not experienced. That limp: A person may develop a limp at any age. She could be thirty. That bun I had always presumed: a fantasy. She might have straight long hair, parted down the middle, playing over her shoulders, like many women today.
I was unmoored, for I was forced to revise my entire narrative—backward, a backward revision—which put in doubt all I had imagined to have come before. Must I now see all the therapy sessions with a different Dora Schussler; call her (in my mind) not “doctor” but “Dora”; see a short skirt barely covering those legs she crosses as she smokes? Could Dora be—this thought terrified me—could she be the sort I would have followed across Union Square?
33.
Dreams: I could not tell if I was waking or sleeping. The fever spiked and sweated down, spiked and sweated down, and the rest of the week I recall only as episodes of shaking chills and the misery of drenched, cold sheets that no one comes to change. I spent the dark hours floating on the rim of sleep and wandered through daylight in a haze, during which time I could not tell what was real—that knocking at my door right now: Was it my neighbor come to complain about the stolen newspaper? Or a phantom remnant of a dream, flotsam that had drifted by on the verge of sleep? The knocks came again. And again. They must be real, I thought. I dragged myself to the door. No one. The empty beach, the leaden sky, the restless back of the ocean, rising and falling like a great beast, from here to the rim of Asia—source of the scourge that had laid me low.
I played the radio. Day and night. It was my only contact with the world. The landlord had left behind an old, wooden, fabric-fronted radio, some of the fabric torn. The tuner often drifted between stations, so that everything I heard emerged out of static and returned into it, almost in rhythm with my fever, the static seeming to bury me under storms of snow just as the shaking chills grabbed hold of me. Talk shows, panel discussions, news—I tried to hear anything that was broadcast live, anything that chattered on. Even the stations full of shouted commercials: no matter, as long as it was a living announcer who did the promotion, reciting now, in this moment, if only to hear the yelp of humanity. Then the radio tuner would drift, and I would be cast off again into the emptiness of electronic noise.
Through the shivering curtains of static came whispers of strange reports, horrors and chaos, murders, women